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Saturday, January 20, 2018

Starting a Silent Legions Campaign

My D&D
game recently died. Its not really anyone’s fault, just creative ennui and
entropy, largely on the GM’s part (that’s me). Three years is a good run.

After taking
a break for a couple of months over the holiday peak, I’m ready to start a new
campaign with my home group. At my son’s request, I’m running some good old
fashioned Lovecraftian horror. Instead of the old stand-by of Call of Cthulhu, I am going to use Kevin
Crawford’s Silent Legionsfor some modern
day sandbox horror. A couple of my players are super-versed in the Cthulhu
mythos, so using Silent Legions’s
mythos creation tools to create my own cosmic horrors should keep them on their
toes. I had good success with Crawford’s sci-fi game, Stars Without Number, so I’m pretty confident about Silent Legions.

I’m setting
the game in Washington State, centered first in Seattle. It took a lot of
thinking, but I eventually settled of Washington because of the geographic
variety it offers. You’ve got the ocean coasts, big tech-center cities, small
rural towns, Indian reservations, forests, desert, mountains, and even
volcanoes. All sorts of places to hide hideous cults and monsters.

The PCs will
all be part of the Khamsa Society, a
secret society dedicated to investigating the occult. The society has a
cell-like organization, and individual cells are largely self-sufficient. Kind
of like the Hunters in Supernatural without
the firepower. It’s a loose organization mostly used as an excuse to get the
PCs together and send them into ruinous places.

The main
cosmic antagonists of the campaign will be an alien pantheon known as The House of Broken Glass. Broken glass
both distorts perception and shreds the flesh. Gods of the Outer Dark, they
were cast out in the days of Lemuria. Now they fester in the womb of
hyperspace, awaiting rebirth. The Bleak Sigil of Dagh-Othyg-Zoag
presages their arrival.

Lovecraft is an obvious influence on the campaign,
along with Clark Ashton Smith by extension. But I’m also drawing ideas from Clive
Barker and Lucio Fulci. I’m also tapping into some Grant Morrison, specifically
The Invisibles and especiallyNameless, a comic that profoundly
disturbed me.

We do
character creation this weekend, and if we’re lucky we can swing into the first
adventure. The PCs will be investigating some missing college students and a
haunted house. As I have it set up, the PC will be walking into the aftermath
of a 1980s slasher movie, having to figure out what happened and what they can
do make sure it doesn’t happen again. Should be fun!

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Who I Am

I am a long-time gamer who enjoys both new-style story games and old-style OSR stuff. I love drawing maps and goofy monsters. I help write, layout, and illustrate games for Hex Games, and I keep taking stabs at creating webcomics with mixed results. I talk about RPGs (and other things) at my Bernie the Flumph blog.